It appears that details circulating the internet about Kanye West’s new album Rich Black American, including the record’s title, are all part of an elaborate hoax. A member of Kanye forum KTT named Rated K apparently unravelled the identity of the mysterious XXXXXX, who first started the latest K.West album rumours earlier this week.

As explained in an exclusive report by Comatose Mag, the ruse unfolded thus:

On Sunday, 3rd February, XXXXXX started a thread title “Rich Black American 09|24|2013”. The original post included what appeared to be a screen shot of Rich Black American in iTunes.

XXXXXX then proceeded to publish information relating to the album, including a track list and special guest artists, in a series of cryptic posts. After successfully leading on fans and media outlets around the world, XXXXXX was exposed after accidentally breaking character.

In a separate thread titled ‘Pros and Cons of Meth’, user XXXXXX published a post about watching Breaking Bad. Although the post was quickly deleted it was enough for KTT admin to trace it to identify XXXXXX as another KTT user who posts under the account MC.

Finally, XXXXXX confessed to being Matt Closson in his last Rich Black American post which read, “follow me on twitter @mvttclosson”. KTT admin confirmed the post, stating, “I checked user agent strings in the database and found about 20 sessions with a matching string. About half of the users were recently active. Then I just looked through posts and his posts matched the writing style of one of them: MC.”

Indeed it was a intriguing prank played by Closson – Music Feeds, along with dozens of other online publishers, were all roped in, cultivating the hype around the “new album”. It was certainly more complex than the fake website last September, which claimed West’s sixth solo studio album would be titled Black American Psycho.

Just goes to show how much we’re all looking forward to Yeezy‘s latest. And if this is NOT a hoax, then it’s the best goddamn marketing campaign the interwebs has ever seen.